Sunday, November 03, 2013

Blog 10: Egos and Errors

You would think people would be grateful to have access to
other people that are capable of helping them be successful when for FREE when
the professors they actually PAY for do not. I was one of those people who were
reluctant. This was probably because I was never told I had to be tutored. I was
always the one who helped others, so receiving or asking for help has always
been a struggle for me. It was not until I took ENGL 1010 that I was required
to see a tutor, and I learned a lot from the tutor, but I still did not see a
reason to go back. It honestly was not until I took ENGL 2010 and had to come
back again that I saw the value of the Writing Center. I learned that I was not
the perfect writer, and I needed help with my grammar (especially pronoun and
antecedent agreement!) Once, I started working in the WC, I dealt with students,
who were reluctant and resistant to being tutored. However, many of them were
not as open-minded to change as I was.

I remember one experience last week with a guy a few years
younger than me that was taking an art class and was required to come to us for
a paper he was writing. He pretty much had to write a short paper about the
paintings he saw and use the vocabulary from the text to do so. We talked for a
bit about the assignment and how he felt about it, and of course, he hated it
but wrote he loved and appreciated the paintings because his professor’s
friend, the artist’s paintings he had to critique, was going to be viewing
these papers.

Anyway, throughout the whole session, he was honestly a
jerk. Of course, he came in with his friend, who was working on the same paper,
and they kept making gestures to each other during the session, and he would
frequently zone out. My patience is already thin with people over the age of
twelve, but he just REALLY irked my nerves because he was so disengaged but
needed the help. Almost every time I would point out an error he had, he would
make me repeat it because he would not pay attention when we would have
literally just went over the concept. And, if he did actually stay on task for
those few seconds, he would just seem really arrogant to me by his facial
expressions and posture; although, he did write down my suggestions. We spent
over the thirty minutes going through his paper because I know he badly needed
the tutoring, but it was a waste of his time because he did not learn anything.

I wanted to tell him how I felt, but I figured he would not
care, so I wrote his brown form and called it a day. Reflecting back on this
session, he was probably trying to look cool and nonchalant in front of his
friend and did not want to seem stupid (he literally almost had an error every
sentence). I think if he had come alone, he would have taken the session more
seriously.